


the snow that swept through the halls

by crownlessliestheking



Series: Feanorian Week 2021 [1]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, Fëanorian Week 2021, Himring, M/M, Mild References to Past Torture, Nudity, Scars, Sensuality, Siege of Angband, introspective, kingship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 13:19:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30072837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/crownlessliestheking
Summary: He looks down at his fist, imagines a sword in it, imagines the Silmarils in it. This is the hand that will smite Morgoth and pry his father’s treasures from the iron crown, even if he must tear Angband itself apart to do so. This is the hand that will hold the Silmarils once more.(This is the hand that will burn with them.)
Relationships: Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo
Series: Feanorian Week 2021 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2212536
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	the snow that swept through the halls

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I'm going to challenge myself a bit, and see if I can manage to post a fic a day for Feanorians week! No promises, and they'll all be fairly short, I think, but. I'm excited. So: Day 1, Maedhros, here we go.
> 
> Title from Jenny of Oldstones.

Maedhros: Childhood, **Kingship,** Torture, **Adjusting/Coping** , Unity, **Beauty**

* * *

There is a mirror in Maedhros’s room, one that he covered with a bolt of fabric when he first took up residence in Himring, in a lord’s rooms that befitted his station. Or so they say. He saw the look on his brothers’ faces, when he yielded the kingship to their uncle.

No, there is no love lost between them for that decision, he thinks ruefully. Curvo had considered it a slight, a betrayal against their father, and Maedhros had been in no shape to tell him otherwise. He had been in a shape to do very little, in those days after Thangorodrim. Kingship had been beyond him, when he had failed his people so, though to admit that to his brothers would be to spell weakness.

Once, perhaps, when he was Maitimo, he would have done so.

Once, perhaps, when he was Nelyo, the eldest, near a third parent to Ambarussar, when he was still the same elf who had held each of them in his arms, braided their hair, helped with their first crafts.

But not then.

And even now, near a century later, with the Siege holding strong and the swords of his land pointed outwards at the mountain, for Gorthaur’s fell beasts to die on their edges, he thinks that this suits him better than kingship. He can lead, and he knows now that he must- he must tend to his brothers, he must direct their fury at Morgoth and not each other, he must encourage them to build their strength and be lords in their own right, and so he has.

But to be a king, still caught in the teeth of their Oath?

No. That will not do.

Better his uncle, better one who had not chosen to slay their kin. Better one respected, who had led his people through a hardship that Maedhros cannot begin to imagine. Better one who had not been twisted before the might of Sauron. His father would not have done so; his grandfather died rather than yield the Silmarils. His uncle, too, would break rather than bend, and what had Maedhros done but bend and beg and plead, even when he told himself that he would not? Even when he swore it?

He was not fit to be king after that, not when there is only one Oath that he may keep, not when his is the family that has caused such suffering in others. Half his brothers had been furious with him for it, the rest had looked at him with eyes that were too close to pity, and none of them had truly understood his decision. But now, years and years into their watchful, waiting peace, as their strength grows and they pin their foe in the hole from whence he came, he knows that he was right to do so. He thinks that they know, too.

He presses the palm of his hand against the cool glass of the mirror. Himring is cold, but there is a roaring fire in the room, and it casts the stone in dancing yellow light. Some strands of his hair are molten gold, others copper, and yet others silvered, near the temples. Fingon had wept once to see it there, but now he kisses at his temples and professes his love.

Behind him, a shadow moves, and Maedhros’s fingers twitch to reach for his sword. The fire jumps, spits sparks onto the floor. The shadow resolves itself into Fingon, braids gleaming with gold too, though he’s dressed in nothing else but a robe that hangs off his shoulders and the hem of which pools on the ground beneath him.

Slowly, Maedhros allows himself to relax. The days when he would find himself wondering if this was all a trick, one of Gorthaur’s crueller arts, are few and far between, mastered with ruthless precision as his body and mind both grew stronger.

(Maedhros does not use ósanwë now as often as he once did, in those early days after Thangorodrim, when he could barely speak, when he mistrusted that he had truly been rescued. Then, but for the pain in his stump, the unbearable physicality of it that not even Sauron could weave into his illusions, he had not known. He had refused anything to dull it, after that first night when he awoke and found that he had a knife to his brother’s throat, Ambarussa’s eyes wide and terrified reflections of his own. This had been forgiven; the twins have ever been too kind. But ever after, they would brush their minds against his own, so as not to take him by surprise, and he had felt how they flinched from the raw, oozing wounds still within him. But now, he does not need to, but for when he wakes from the darkest of nightmares.)

“Are you not coming to bed?” he asks. His voice is soft.

“Soon,” Maedhros tells him. This is not enough, but Fingon is the one who cut him from the mountain, who carried him forth into the light, and Maedhros yearned for his touch even when it was a blade biting into his wrist, severing muscle and bone until he fell.

“Hm. The mirror is uncovered.” Fingon comes up behind him, chin hooking on Maedhros’ shoulder. “Were you planning on moving it to the bedroom itself, then?”

“ _No_ ,” Maedhros says, scandalized. A low laugh is his reward. “Perhaps another time.” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “I have grown stronger, I think. With my left hand. It is as good as my right was, before.”

“You look stronger,” Fingon tells him. “Certainly every inch the lord of Himring, though you’re not nearly carved out of the stones like some might sing.”

“My brother has always been over-fond of metaphor,” Maedhros sighs. “ _‘Lo, my lord of carven stone,_ _upon his carven throne, the fury of battle’s seeds sown,’_ is the verse he last sent me.”

“It is very like him,” Fingon says, with all the impressive diplomacy of Nolofinwë’s line behind it.

“You disagree with his description?” Maedhros asks.

“But of course. Fairest in Aman and fairest in my eyes you are,” Fingon answers, easily. “Maybe even fairer now that my father is king; you never looked so light here, as after his coronation.”

“Being consort to the Crown Prince, I am told, is far superior to being the Prince himself. Or High King,” Maedhros says, sly. It is something Fingon used to tell him, in those days of light in Valinor.

“It is lucky indeed that Atya is here to save us both from that burden,” Fingon tells him. He laughs, quiet. “Did you know, that I had not once thought I would be King one day?”

“Neither did I,” Maedhros answers, truth for truth. “Nor did I think I would be so spectacularly bad at it.”

“You were not bad,” is the immediate response. “And do not say that you were captured. We didn’t know then, what the Enemy was capable of. We know now. We have endured, Maitimo, far more than we could have thought.”

He does not reply to that. He does know; they both do. Maedhros knows it as intimately as he knows his own body, this thing that Morgoth would have taken from him, this flesh that Sauron treated as his own canvas for the torment he thought of as art. And Fingon- Fingon had seen him first, before all others. Fingon had crept through the stinking pits and the crevasses and the swarms of orcs on the mountains that had surrounded the peak Maedhros had hung from; they both heard the twisted songs of the other captives, trading their lives away for work, trading their hope for despair.

He closes his eyes against the memory, the phantom reek that sears through his throat. The fire here is warm, he is in Himring. Fingon is here, and his touch is but life.

Maedhros watches Fingon’s hands on his body in the mirror. His own face is a carved, impassive mask; he thinks he does resemble nothing so much as a statue, despite Fingon’s opinions of Maglor’s verse.

(He wonders, for a single aching moment, if his mother so far across the sea would bring this face forth from stone, or if she would not bear to see how he had changed. No. Even then, when they had not truly known how badly things would go, she had never flinched from the truth, only weathered it. But still, he hopes she does not know, if only to spare her this pain, too.)

The silence hangs heavy over them, even now. The secrets that they carry, the burdens that they must bear.

Fingon does not talk about the Ice. Maedhros does not talk about Thangorodrim. The specter of both hang between them in the darkest of nights, when they are each left to imagine the horrors that dwells within the other.

He is warm, against Maedhros. The arm looping around his waist, the press of lips first to his shoulder, then to his neck, then to the very corner of his jaw, where the skin is soft and still sensitive.

“Fingon,” he says, soft. “You are right. We have endured, we will continue to endure, until we break the fetters of those he has kept and dash his crown from his head. Your father is king, as he should be. A king must put his people first, and _my_ father-,” Maedhros has to pause. The words stick in his throat like thorns. “My father did not do that. Nor can I afford to.”

“The Silmarils,” Fingon says. Bitter, although Maedhros pretends not to hear it.

“The Silmarils, and Morgoth,” he corrects. “I will see him cast from his throne in Angband, I will see those pits flooded and reduced to ash, I will see my father’s legacy freed from his grasp. Nothing can come before it.”

Not even you, he does not say, but he thinks Fingon hears it. He does not flinch from it, though, only smiles, his eyes sad.

“I know,” he says. “And you will do it. No. _We_ shall do it, for I will be at your side. Always, I promised then, and always, I mean it now. So I said to Maitimo, so I say to Maedhros. You are still my beloved.”

“And I am stronger, for what I have endured. We both are,” Maedhros adds. In the mirror, he watches Fingon close his eyes, and he knows that it is not at the sight of him.

So to Maitimo, so now to Maedhros. It is not so foolish, to believe Fingon when he says this; Fingon has seen him at his worst yet, Fingon is the closest to knowing the depth of these wounds. He is not healed, but he is still strong.

(He is different, yet at his core, he is still someone that Fingon can love. Maedhros clings to that.)

And strength, here, is what matters. Not beauty, inconstant as it may be, though Maedhros no longer looks in the mirror and sees flaws where there was once perfection, no longer stares at the scarring on his stump, the ragged cuts in his ears, the shiny-pale slash of scarring healed as best as it can. He looks in the mirror, and he sees only himself, as he is.

Some would say that he is not so comely now, as he once was. But well-formed he is indeed; this, Maedhros thinks, curling the fingers of his good hand into a fist.

(Well-formed are the scars on him, too, or so his tormentor thought. Those inflicted by Gorthaur himself are precise; it is not for nothing that the Black Foe’s lieutenant so earned his name.)

He looks down at his fist, imagines a sword in it, imagines the Silmarils in it. This is the hand that will smite Morgoth and pry his father’s treasures from the iron crown, even if he must tear Angband itself apart to do so. This is the hand that will hold the Silmarils once more.

(This is the hand that will burn with them.)

In Maedhros’ room in Himring chill, there is a mirror, and when he meets the eyes of his reflection, burning bright and terrible, when he sees Fingon’s face pressed to a scarred cheek, his skin made lovelier for his presence, he sees not a king, but a leader.

He tilts his head to press his lips to Fingon’s, and he tastes victory, bittersweet like wine.


End file.
